


no compasses, no signs (it's time)

by Victoryindeath2



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: All shall be well, Ben Solo throughout his life, Ben had a loving family but was still lonely and tormented, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Love and Loss and Love Again, Reylo - Freeform, Snoke is the Worst, Young Ben Solo, and Hope, and happy birthday Eden because I promised you a fic for your bday one time, and wrote two paragraphs that turned out to be the reylo scene at the end, canon compliant generally speaking, have a little faith, healing fic in the hell year of 2020, ofc it's reylo happy birthday Maria!, special thanks to Taylor Swift for several lines I borrowed, why don't you read this nice fic and then maybe you'll calm down
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:27:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27177869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victoryindeath2/pseuds/Victoryindeath2
Summary: Ben Solo's life—a wandering path. The things he loses, the things he gains, and all the things that remain the same. Love and understanding are the most precious things in the world."Half dead was, to Ben, better than all gone."
Relationships: Ben Solo & Han Solo, Ben Solo | Kylo Ren & Han Solo, Leia Organa & Ben Solo, Leia Organa & Ben Solo & Han Solo, Leia Organa & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Snoke & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 3
Kudos: 20





	no compasses, no signs (it's time)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MJosephine10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MJosephine10/gifts), [mmescarlette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mmescarlette/gifts).



Ben is six, and Coruscant—by day and night—hums, rattles, zooms, and growls with the voices and technology of two trillion creatures. When his mom holds him in her arms, tangling his dark curls in her fingers, Ben loves it all, the countless flashes of light and dark in the Force, the pulsing warm signatures of the planet’s life. He feels interwoven with—everything. Out there, millions of children like him press their ears into their mothers’ steady heartbeats, _one_ two _one_ two _one_ two. 

Sometimes though, Ben’s mom leaves him.

“I’ll be back soon,” she promises today, even though some planet on the other side of the galaxy whose name Ben can’t pronounce spins talk of revolt against the New Republic.

Soon can mean tomorrow or next month, because Leia Organa Solo’s sharp courage and sharper wits are needed to quell the disaster, and things always get worse before they get better.

That’s what Ben’s dad says. He’s right, except for when he is wrong.

_They don’t always get better._

_-_

_Sizzling skin and pain that creeps ceaselessly through the density of his bones. Training is—is not torture. It isn’t a gift either, and Ben—Kylo—cannot bring himself to thank Snoke for it, even if it distracts himself from the way his thoughts crush out of his brain and scatter the floor like bits of sandglass._

_“Again,” Snoke commands, and Kylo heaves himself over, from his back to his chest, and then he rises to his knees. He lifts his hand to brush the blood from his lips, but stops._

_Crimson already coats his palm, his fingers._

_The last time he was thus injured—_

_“Boy,” Snoke says, and his words grate through his teeth. “Cast off your frailties. Center your mind, draw the pain into your soul. Only then will you have victory.”_

_This sounds vaguely like the Sith code, only Snoke is not a Sith lord. He is but one who knows the deep intricate paths of the Force, and he offers his knowledge freely. He does not seek to contain Kylo Ren, as some have, but he would rather set him free._

_-_

Ben is a child of victory, the holonet says. A symbol of hope. Ben isn’t sure the galaxy knows what victory means, because even though the war ended before he was born, his mom and dad haven’t stopped fighting it.

He has grown up huddled in the nooks and crannies of so many homes on so many different planets, bed abandoned, nightmares fled (for a time), listening to his mom plot and plan and negotiate and argue. There is more arguing than anything else, sometimes with his dad, sometimes with blue-silvered film figures of important people.

Ben doesn’t care for the important people, because they always make his mom leave him in the end. His dad though—

“Buck up, kid,” Han Solo says, wrapping an arm around Ben’s scrawny little shoulders. “Least I’ll be here.”

Ben is ten, and his mother is leaving again. She kisses his forehead and turns away, and he melts into his dad’s side, careful not to bump against his dad’s leg, which is patched with bacta.

He is also careful not to say he’s—happy—his dad suffered a blaster bolt to the thigh last week, even if it is true.

His dad would have flown away with his mom if only he were able stand up on his feet for more than five minutes at a time.

“You need me,” Han had insisted, reaching for his holsters.

“Absolutely not,” Leia snapped. “You’re still half dead.”

Half dead was, to Ben, better than all gone.

-

_“What is that?” Snoke says, his eyes squinting in the way that means he is trying not to curl his lips in disgust._

_The recently birthed Kylo Ren stands at attention, his shoulders struggling to hold the weight of twenty-three years of rejected life, his extended right hand struggling to bear the weight of a three-bladed lightsaber that vibrates violently as though it were the—as though it were a Corellian light freighter caught in a tractor beam.._

_“I have done it,” Kylo Ren says. He has neither slept nor eaten for days, and his black shirt is cold against his back, clinging with sweat. He can barely keep his eyes open, can barely feel more than passing dismay that Snoke is disappointed in him._

_Snoke is dressed in golden shimmering robes and disdain. These things drip from his form like engine oil, but his next words are neutral._

_“So you have. An unusual design, one that has not been seen for quite some time. I commend you for your ambition. Tell me, though, what was your mistake in the construction?”_

_The erratic hum of the saber matches the beat and flow of Kylo’s heart and blood. His head throbs with hunger, and everything is a great pit inside of him—he’s all carved out, not as a mountain, is, to provide home and shelter or minerals for the good of all, but rather as a terribly written essay is excised of useless detail, sentimentality, and false belief. He has about five words left to him, and not one of them can he speak, so ashamed he is of his very_ being _—_

_“My boy,” Snoke says softly, in a way that could almost be comforting if Kylo could not so vividly remember the last time he heard another call him that. “My brave and weary apprentice, I do not condemn your skills in the construction of the saber that will be your dearest friend and tool. But I see before me something very wrong indeed, and I think you must know what it is.”_

_Ben remembers reaching, stumbling barefoot in the dark cave, unable to see at first, only feeling the Force wrapped tightly around his wrist like a thick, angry rope, pulling him viciously down twisting, rocky paths until he reached a red glow of clumped together crystals._

_Now, with great effort, he raises his eyes so that the light of his flickering weapon bisects his vision of Snoke. Something lances his retinas, a pain so hostile he almost drops to his knees—almost._

_“Focus,” Snoke says, level and calm. He is the ship that does not rock, the voice that has always been at Ben—Kylo’s—side, and Kylo grasps at the last sibilant sound and feels it wrap around his body like string, holding him together, holding him vertical._

_Thank you, he would say, except that would make him feel weaker than he is. Instead, he searches for the answer Snoke wants._

_“The kyber crystal that I chose was cracked,” he says at last._

_Snoke waves a hand dismissively. His long, gnarled fingers are like tree roots, and the Force that slides from them tugs at Kylo’s ankles._

_Kylo steps forward, his boots heavy upon the cold black floor that shines up at him with his own grave-pale face._

_“You_ chose _a cracked kyber crystal,” Snoke says. “And there lies your mistake.”_

_Kylo cannot explain the feeling that drew him to the shatter-lined blood-crimson saber-soul. He can see it even now, nestled between metal and vents, its dark brokenness threading inward and turning upon itself._

_He shakes now, muscles aching, especially the one somewhere in the middle of his chest._

_It had taken every bit of his will to hold the crystal together as he removed it from the cave, built up the casing around it. It screamed at him as he armored it, shaped it into a fearsome three-bladed weapon from a whole millennia ago._

_It screamed at him—or maybe it screamed with him._

_Everything lost, everything forgotten, everything unloved._

He _was the everything, that is what—what they used to say._

_“You are everything to us, Ben. No matter if I leave, I will always come back to you.”_

_“You heard your mom, kid. Ain’t no war or big shot with a blaster that could keep us apart. Why, your mom took on a Hutt for me, just think what she would do for you.”_

_That’s what they said, and then they refused to trust him._

_Even Luke—Skywalker—Uncle—_

_“Kylo,” Snoke whispers, and his hands are on Ben’s face, turning his chin, wiping his tears away with his cold fingers. “I don’t blame you for your choice. You may have chosen better, true, but you are rather like me, perhaps. I also chose the cracked kyber, and look what I shall make of it!”_

_Kylo’s throat is blocked thick with grief and gratitude as he gazes upon Snoke’s vision, himself tall as a Wookie’s shoulder, whole and unbreakable at last, not needing_ anybody _, overlooking a galaxy that doubts him no longer._

_He pretends not to notice the shadows that are missing._

-

Ben’s dream of sky-blue butterflies turns into ash, sifted in a great basin of grey and black. He wakes shivering and crying and slips from his bed with every intent to seek out his parents’ bedroom.

It has been three days, however, and his mother is not returned, and the invisible searching hand that Ben flings out in front of him tells him that his father is not asleep, is not even staring up at the dark ceiling, worrying about all the things that Ben is also anxious about.

The Force does not have to tell Ben where to look next.

He breathes very quickly, gulping air in tearful gasps, and his little chest heaves as he runs pell-mell down the hallway, seeking the door that will dump him out onto the railed catwalk in the Millennium Falcon’s hanger.

Once on the other side of it, the comforting disc-shape of the most amazing ship in the galaxy slows Ben’s forward stumble so that it turns into a more measured walk.

(“You are a son of Alderaan,” his mom would say softly when he woke in the dark, screaming over things any child would cry over, and some things they would not. She would poke his plump baby cheeks with a finger, all while her eyes glistened. “It wouldn’t kill you to have a little dignity. At least more than your impossible father.”

His impossible father only laughed. “Dignity is over-rated. Sleep, though, is not, so Your Highness I’m going to have to ask you to close your hatch and buckle down for the long night.”)

The latticed catwalk is cold under Ben’s bare feet.

He finds his dad seated awkwardly on a chair in the _Falcon’_ s cockpit, his injured leg resting on his toolbox. His is replacing some wiring and christening the new bits with a curse—or rather, with a string of curses, loud Corellian ones that Ben knows almost all the meanings of.

“Don’t tell your mom,” Han says when he sees Ben leaning against a control panel, a lopsided grin taking over his face. And then, before Ben can say a word: “You look like hell, kid. Come and join your old man.”

And Ben longs to climb into his dad’s lap, to bury his nose in his dad’s worn vest, breathing in the scents of comforting spice and grease that are irreversibly woven into it. However, the nightmare lingers in his mind, digesting his thoughts as slowly as a colo claw fish digests its prey. He feels squeezed and torn and knocked about, and if the nightmare comes true, if his dad were to push him aside, were to fiddle with his blaster and say he would really rather he never had a son at all—well, Ben would prefer the sharp, horrid teeth of the claw fish, and an excruciating death.

He’s always looking down at his dad in these dreams. It never makes sense, because he is to his dad as his dad is to Uncle Chewie.

“What’s the matter, did your mom tell you to chew me out if you caught me out of bed?” Han has swiveled in his chair, wincing a little as his foot drags onto the floor and his leg twists about.

Ben shakes his head, because he can’t bear to talk about his mom and her missingness. “I’m hungry,” he says, because it’s easier than saying he feels like no one in the galaxy understands him, not even the Voice that promises it will never leave him alone, even when everyone else will. “I’m really, really hungry.”

Han frowns a little, maybe because he can tell Ben is lying, maybe because he doesn’t want to leave the _Falcon_.

Ben bites his lip and tries not to cry, but it doesn’t do any good. A fat tear rolls down his cheek, and he wipes it hurriedly away with a fuzzy sweater sleeve. “And I’m tired,” he says, but his voice wobbles.

He cannot look at his dad anymore, but there is a scraping and a grunting, and maybe a cut-off curse, and then there are arms around him.

“It’s like hell without her, son. I know. I know.”

They have sunk to the floor, because Han really cannot stand for long on his bad leg, and Ben is all a-muddle. Together, they sit, and Han doesn’t let go, and Ben curls up and cries and cries, and no one tells him to stop or says that he is a baby.

Or if they do, Ben doesn’t hear. He only feels his dad’s breathing, steady, steady, and picks at the red embroidered stripes on his dad’s black trousers.

“Sorry, I’m useless, kid,” Han whispers into his curly hair, and Ben clutches at his waist, presses his whole face into his dad’s chest so he can see nothing at all.

“Dad,” he whimpers, and unlike in his dream, the nightmare that felt so real, his dad presses a kiss down upon the very top of his head.

“She’ll be back soon,” Han says, his fingers running through Ben’s hair in a gesture that would be a little more soothing if said fingers didn’t keep getting caught in curls and tangles.

Ben looks up at last, his eyes fastening on the faint scar just below his father’s lower lip.

“But C3PO says that the chances of Mom coming back before a month—”

Han tilts a corner of his mouth upward in the crooked grin Ben knows so well. “You’re a Solo, Ben. Never let that tin can tell you the odds.”

  
Leia Organa Solo returns home two days later. Ben felt her coming hours before her arrival, bearing her heavy burdens on her back, as if he wouldn’t sense them, too, when she presented him with all her love.

“Ben,” she says now, simply, opening her arms. He drops the parchment sheets he has brought out to show her, the sheets that are pages of his best, prettiest attempts at calligraphy. Some are fresh inked, and no doubt now all mussed up, but that scarcely matters.

Ben’s mom does not have to bend nearly so much anymore, to give him a hug, and it strikes Ben that one day he might be taller than her.

Good, he thinks, let me grow.

 _Soon_ , he says to her quietly, brushing against her mind with the Force, _soon I will be able to protect you from all the darkness in the galaxy, and in me._

_In you?_

Ben had not meant to think that last bit, let alone convey it.

 _Yes_ , he continues, biting his lip. _I know you know it’s in me._

His mother does not say nay. What she does say is: _I love you, my darling. You are a light to me and that is all that matters._

The first is truer than anything Ben knows—the second—the mattering—he doubts very much. Still, it’s a thought he clings to as long as he is able.

-

_(A memory he hides in his heart, locked away as though in a dark metal chest, to shield himself from the pain of recall: sitting in a mossy green garden with his mom on a special day they have all to themselves, huddled close together. The scent of summer earth, the large ring that Ben twists around his mom’s fingers over and over, his mom’s sharp, confident demeanor softened by love, love of him. Whispered words in his ear, of a world that was lost, and all the people in it. Lost, lost, lost. All gone.)_

-

“It isn’t much,” Uncle Luke says, waving his hand at a whole eight-foot-wide shelf of scrolls and paper books and soft-glowing holobooks. He wears a smile on his face, and the beginnings of a beard. “Still, I add to it whenever I can. If you ever feel bored, or want to get away from my other students for a while, come here.”

For a long, long time, the little library is Ben’s dearest refuge. He fills it with worthless trinkets—smooth stones, pretty feathers, a fat, dripping candle, and his own reams of calligraphy. He has begun to copy out the books he reads, and while it is an arduous process, it is one that keeps him occupied, and he can pretend with each new start that by the time he inks his last letter or symbol, his mom and dad might have arrived for a visit.

Sometimes they do. Often they don’t.

The room where he sleeps is filled with the small presents they send him, but the most treasured things he possesses are the few handwritten letters he has received. His mom does not usually have time to sit down and write things out, and therefore prefers to speak to him through a hologram, so that she might see his face and reach out to feign a touch. But she knows the things he loves, and so it is he can trace out her boldly sketched words and the precious phrase _My little angel_ with the tip of his finger, and feel closer to her just so.

His dad’s handwriting is atrocious, and the sketches of all the obnoxious people he is forced to play polite with are even worse, but these letters, too, are read over and over again. Every now and then, Han still calls Ben his fellow bandit, and jokes about breaking him out of Luke’s makeshift academy before he can be irretrievably molded into a model Jedi (whatever that is), so that they can roam the galaxy together as father and son, and Ben laughs and cries and then feels guilty and goes for a run in the wilderness outside the academy’s doors, or calls out to the Voice and spills all of his hurt.

He should not be so hurt. He is loved, and Uncle Luke is always kind and has begun talk of taking Ben with him on his searches for Jedi artifacts. There is a whole, beautiful life ahead of Ben. He must simply learn to deal with his weaknesses before that.

 _Are these_ your _weaknesses, Ben, or the weaknesses of the people who claim to care about you?_

Sometimes, Ben hates the Voice.

Sometimes, he thinks even the Voice doesn’t know anything at all.

-

_The girl, the girl. She does not feel like a friend, exactly, lurking as she does at the edge of dream and memory, flitting back and forth across the landscape of his mind like a vulptex bristling her spine with warning._

_But then, Kylo Ren does not know what a friend feels like at all in this life, and his past life is crowded with shadows and twisted images, words choked by doubt and fear._

_He wishes he could sweep his arms from one star to another, so that the galaxy mist swirled about the girl’s face would clear away._

_He also wishes he would_ never _see her face, lest her eyes gaze upon him in disgust, her brow with judgment. He has had enough of that in his count of years. He does not need yet another stranger to fear and despise him._

-

 _Sometimes I wonder how they could have abandoned you, their own son, on this wretched rock of a planet,_ the Voice says.

“It wasn’t an abandonment,” seventeen-year-old Ben says sharply. He’s practicing his forms on a lonely cliff-edge, surrounded by scraggly thistles, with an ocean underneath. He speaks aloud to the formless Voice, because it is the closest he dares get to shouting at his ever-present companion.

 _The best thing about you_ , the Voice muses quietly, _the best thing about you is the worst thing about you. You tell yourself so many lies._

Ben can almost feel a hand on his shoulder, and he shies away quickly.

Shaking, every inch of him shaking, and he scores the ground beneath him with the dazzling star-blue of his saber.

Luke is overly kind to him in the evening, having found the evidence of his emotions run wild, but he tells Ben that he must focus on self-control.

“I won’t make you tell me what troubles you, if you really want to keep your secrets,” Luke says, an understanding smile for the boy he cannot understand. “But you must find some other outlet for your pains, or darkness will accumulate within you.”

This has been the fear of every single person in Ben’s life, from when he was scarcely more than a child—and he’s always been aware of it.

 _Beware, beware_ , the Voice chants, _lest you fall. Hmm, I rather think they fear to see you rise_.

At night, Ben weeps into his pillow, desperately clutching at his sheets. 

-

_In the end, in what should have been a new beginning, yet again, he murders his dad, and in every second thereafter, he himself dies._

_(Half dead is better than all gone.)_

_(Lost, lost, lost.)_

-

It’s something that happens, when you must continually say goodbye to the people you love. Every time feels like it might be your last, and one day, it will be.

(No one is ever really gone.)

-

_“When I found you, I saw raw, untamed power, and beyond that, something truly special.”_

_“You have too much of your father’s heart in you, young Solo.”_

_“I want to be free of this pain.”_

_“I did want to take your hand. Ben’s hand.”_

_“My son is alive...come home.”_

_“Ben.”_

_-_

On a green, green planet far from strife and war and the shattered and plastered collective consciousness of an entire galaxy, Ben reclines against the thick trunk of a slanted tree with bark as soft as velvet. Not far away, Rey is working underneath the _Millennium Falcon_ —something is wrong with it, as always—and Ben, his mind half elsewhere, loops his calligraphy quill in inky spirals. Rey opens the exhaust vent, and hot steam whistles out, and Rey yells, more startled than injured, and slams the vent closed with a resounding clang.

Ben looks up, amused. “Always been a piece of junk,” he says, but his tone hints of something both affectionate and regretful. 

Rey brushes her hair away from her forehead. Her hand leaves grease marks streaked across her skin. There is a smoky dot of something on the tip of her nose, and Ben stares. 

He stands up, walks hesitantly towards Rey, but she doesn’t notice him, just reaches up to the panel above her and takes a wrench to exposed pipes. 

“It might be junk,” Rey says, huffing a little as she twists a screw and then bangs her wrench on a thruster, “but she’s the only ship worth having in the whole galaxy. Just needs a little work.”

Ben is standing right beside her now, and her eyes are so dark and the corner of her mouth can’t decide whether to rise up in laughter or to press downward in determination. Freckles lie strewn across her face, and Ben almost restrains himself from kissing her.

Almost, except—his lips brush light, slow and gentle on her cheek, because she is who she is, and she chose him, and allowed him to choose her, and it was one of those things they just did, and he doesn’t even know what he is doing really, except he feels whole, and complete, and nothing less than utterly grateful for this spring day and the way he can almost feel the breeze.

Life and love are more tangible every day.

Rey smiles when Ben kisses her, and when he releases her, only to wrap his arms around her shoulders from behind, she leans her whole body towards him without once turning from her work. He allows her to stay there, even though it means he must bend a little at the knees, at the shoulders, because he is too tall to stand under this part of the ship without lowering himself.

Finally, he steps away from her, and he’s not sure if the hands clasped together are real or a Force thing, but he leaves another kiss on the one that is not his, as a gift. Then he closes his eyes and drifts back to his tree. He sets the calligraphy quill aside and pulls paints and brushes out of his satchel. 

He just sits and watches for a while longer, and then the colors come. Black and white and delicate pink, her cheeks when she stands against the wind and defies death and pain to keep her from hope—it’s an everlasting thing, even for a body faded out of time.

_Please let me stay here, with you._

_Please._

His mother did not imbue him with the last bit of her life for nothing, she couldn’t have.

Rey sees the difference in him, feels his warmth now.

_It is close, Ben. All shall be well._

_Look, listen—it’s morning now_

_(you're brighter now)_


End file.
